Tuesday, March 10, 2009

For about a while now (okay, much longer), Google had been quite the useful and resourceful friend that helps point you to the information you need. It also introduced the importance of using keywords that allow you to dig up and refine whatever it is the results that you are looking for. You know that something has 'arrived' when a proper noun is being used as a verb.

Yet, for all it's search brilliance and vastness of information under its disposal, there exists albeit for a few, a belief that there's room for improvement (though I was not one of them). The use of wikis provided us with a glimpse of what crowd-sourcing can do yet pooling all the resource within a specific time frame seemed a task that appeared insurmountable.

Yet, if there was value in crowd wisdom, it seemed that it was taken for granted and left to the wikis. Consider if each person was a resource, then social networks would sensibly hold the largest information and computational infrastructure aided by the ubiquity of web access. However, networks stopped short of this realization and instead focused and rejoiced on the value of being 'social'.

And like great discoveries of the past, we now have accidentally tripped, err twipped, over this great feature made valuable by social networks. Designed initially as a simple (almost) real-time communication app, it has now transcended it's original purpose and has continued to do so. (Thank you Open API!)

In what way, you might ask that it delivers something that Google algorithmically tries to do - provide real time responses and results - which would prove the difference between exact pertinent information vs timely pertinent information. Think Twitter Search, MicroPlaza and Twitterfall. Try them and be amazed in real time!